I’d fallen to slumber while listening to her endless incessant gushing about her new arcane ‘discoveries’. No matter how many times she’d elucidated to me in agonizingly intricate detail about the many things each ’aetherial experiment’ suggested; no matter how blatantly she walked through every step of her entirely scientific actions: I was still as enamored with her as ever, and I was brought to the heights of bliss all the same.

  Certainly, her babbling might have irritated me, for it was almost the worst it had ever been — In the past I would have sealed her lips by physical action, or I would have simply teased her until her babbling became unintelligible and therefore adorable… but unfortunately: I knew no such method of response while my lover was a rock — but even still it was a blessed return to the happiness we had known for so long, and I was greatly relieved of the burdens I’d carried in my heart.

  In the darkness of my dreamland, I could hear her sweet voice singing in gentle lullaby, and I could almost feel her caress again, so softly her words touched me. Though at first my dreams were as wonderful as any I’d ever known, they soon shifted towards the nightmarish. They became bitter, and hard, and they were vicious as they gripped me tight and dragged me away from that once happy place; they were villainous, and they were scandalous, and despite having put every effort into driving these terrible things from my mind: they hadn’t yet departed from me, and I was theirs, and they would have me know it!

  I was then trapped in a strange and terrible nightmare which preyed upon my recent death and apparent resurrection such that I could not escape them for their very novelty. Monsters might chase a person, but they still can at least attempt to run, or if they’re cleverer still: they might otherwise change the paradigm in which their dream’s setting haunts them, such as running from open fields into a city filled from skyline to sewer with soldiers… but a person can no longer use this simple technique if they themselves have become the monster.

  The polar extremes I'd experienced yesterday thrust me through all the spectrums of joy, and sadness, and anger, and all these original emotions would combine in such an abstract and indecipherable pattern as to leave me entirely stunned before them… and the absolute kaleidoscope of visions which assaulted my senses.

  When I was but a foundling underfoot, I remembered finding myself inside the Mother’s locked room — for I was rather a little urchin in my early youth — and inside she’d hidden many treasures of the Ancients, of which I’d stolen away from her that small plastic tube, and its fascinating display of unbelievable colours affected my young mind greatly. It filled many of my days then, such that today it lay broken from the wrenching my tiny hands had given to it… but I held it to me still in this frontier, for it was a memento of the very best and the worst that city had imprinted upon me. 

  So beautiful, so colourful, and so treacherous to possess. Just as psychedelics can affect the mind in incomprehensible ways, so too did these dancing emotions of mine begin to change for the worse. I would shake myself away from these bizarre and horrible notions as I became aware of them, but then they would come back, for they clung so tightly to me now that I could not simply be rid of them!  

  Always it started with the smell, so sweet and hard to resist, and it tempted me closer to the new emotions that had invaded my dreamscape. A thirst would then follow, and I couldn’t help but to fixate upon the blood I’d find before me. Then, the cruelest, most despicable sights would come to me, and I would see them, and…  no, as if I should allow for such a thing!

  I could see myself ravaging the bodies of everyone I’d ever known. They were being feasted upon as if by wolves, but the only animal I could see was… myself. 

They were alive at times, and dead at others; sometimes I could see them relax into that horrible scene with rapture upon their faces, and I would shudder simultaneously in horrified revulsion and... as blood’s scent rushed into my nostrils I found myself affected by a strange arousal, but it was only a dream; an unexplainably bizarre and disgusting one, if oddly appealing, but a dream nonetheless.  

  Other times, when their agonized screams would alight my ears, I would thirst so for the living, and at those moments I better knew what I was capable of… and what I would never allow to be realized!

  Out of my own body, I watched myself with a mixture of horror and awe… and I came to a conclusion then, as well as one is able to in a dream: it was me, it was their own fault for being so mouth-wateringly sweet, it was a part of me now, and there’s nothing wrong with doing what one must, or perhaps I was rather a part of it, as I was certainly much more than I once had been. I had thought that eating literally more matter than I’d previously contained before would surely be sufficient, but I was wrong, I was so very very wrong.

  Time and time again these visions burned into me, and there they left an imprint that could not be refuted. Still, I would all the same try to shove it away, for this insanity… surely it couldn’t be real, as it defied reason, but then I was back in my body, and I felt more than that Thirst for life again.

  I had inside me a Hunger for death, and I seemed drawn inexorably towards some aetherial phenomenon beyond my very body and soul, and altogether these three formed a terrible need like none I’d ever before experienced… so strong as to even eclipse my need for her!

  When my thoughts would rest upon her, I would be freed from the strange feelings I could scarcely confront… and they would be replaced with thoughts that were all too real.  For so long, as long as I remember, even as a foundling: she’d entranced me.

  She alone had been enough for me to turn my back on the rest of the world and all its wonders, were I so made to choose between them, though she never made me, despite how jealous she always was to share me with the world! The frontier needed doctors, and she needed a quiet place far from the reach of her father, and we’d rather thought we’d found such a place, and before yesterday: we’d even called it home.

  Always she looked so beautiful to me, so enchanting, and delicious, so lovely, and sweet; her golden hair framed her form like honey, and she was so enticing I just couldn’t help but to eat her up. Despite our evening’s symposium of discovery: I longed for her touch again. I was weak to my desire for her in the first place, as I was so very susceptible to her, and she knew it well.  

  She… she always knew just what to do to take control. With me, no bonds were necessary, for I was held prisoner by mere touch. My love for her was uncontainable; it encompassed me in full, and it drowned me to my deepest fathom, and it suffocated me until I was breathless but for her. I loved every second I’d ever shared with her, and every small taste of her presence sent me to a Heaven without compare.

  The greatest nightmare of all is the kind you cannot walk away from; I’ve long thought it, and ever it has held true for me. Drink the blood of the children? No, that anyone could surely deny their errant spirit of, and even mock its feeble thirst, as they were children for all goodness’s sake, and I could never be enticed by such an objectionable thing as to harm them! 

  Easiest thing in the world to deny, easier still to resist surely, easy enough to ea- no, clearly not so ‘easy’ as my impotently ghoulish nature might have wanted it to be. It was obvious now to me, that disembodied dream had rather disentangled my desires from that overwhelming experience they’d first been: unless I was starving until my very flesh cried out to the point of madness, I was the stronger.

  How could I ever hurt them? I swore an oath to do no harm, and I’d rather intended to keep it. Still, how could my mind be so villainous as to even conjure up images of my hurting the children? I hated myself for even having the capacity to dream of such things. No, no matter what, I could never be driven to this, and I would ensure my death long before it could ever come to such an absurd thing, not that such would even be necessary!

  However, a disgusting thing never really holds us to account, for we know it’s abhorrence well, and it is therefore made powerless before our revulsion. What always takes us… are the things we see nothing wrong with. Those are insidious, for they are unknowable, and they are powerful, and I would contest that it is here where we are at our weakest; it’d certainly been true enough of myself.  

  A person only really falls into an abhorrent thing when they start making excuses for it. ‘But I was hungry and I might have starved’, they might have said, ‘but I was angry and I might have suffered’ they might have reasoned, ‘but they deserved it and I might have delivered justice’ they may well have declared… and with these excuses come theft, and murder, and war. Only when we find our actions justifiable do we release our civilized coil, for morality is infinitely mutable once we’ve excused ourselves of its absolute tyranny.

  Once, long ago, back when I’d first met Arriana, I’d exacted church morality upon myself with an extreme vigilance, as was expected of any self-respecting Christian. I stood on guard against all that I’d ever been told of what constituted right and wrong, but my desire for her was merciless, and though I’d forbade her from myself: I eventually succumbed to the terribly inevitable need she’d impressed upon me.  

  Ultimately, what shattered that facet of my morality was a simple excuse: she was the one to first push it upon me, so I only had to ‘give in’ to her wants, and in that manner I freed myself of the responsibilities I’d held to account for so long. That singular misstep was the keystone from which near-all of my churchfound goodness soon departed me, as before I’d even known it: she’d opened me up to wonders I’d never so much as imagined through all those years of perverse interest in my best friend, and I never mourned of my loss of those societal rules. 

  Because it was something between us, desired by us both, exciting, and easily compatible with the rest of my morality: I’d relaxed my miserable self-policing. Would that I had stopped with just having her, we might never have been so far into the frontier, hunted down like plagued animals through the outer cities and border towns! Oh, but I loved her, and I’d believed then in the good sense of people, and I’d wanted the world to know that she was mine, and mine alone!

  That was a mistake I never should have made, for in their eyes we had exchanged our abstinence for depravity of the highest order, and so deeply I’d sunken into my feelings for her that were I able to drink her and eat her: I would never have hungered or thirsted again!  Hedonists, they called us, and heathens, and the less philosophically and theologically inclined had still other names for us, which were oddly both more plentiful in variety, and more hurtful to hear.  

  No matter, I’d never considered eating her like… this. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d tasted her, but it was the first time I ever dreamed of taking a bite of her flesh… It should have disgusted me, but it’d targeted a weakness I could never have defended. These wanton visions depicted her desire for me, her excitement, and I felt such a passion towards the woman I love that I never could deny her something that would make her eyes glow so bright and rapturously.

  Debauched as it was, I liked her smile as I bled her… the way she would squirm in my dreamland before every nibble, and the sweet screams that came with every piece of flesh I tore from her! I loved expanding my existing perversions towards her to such a degree, as all of my newfound wants cried out for her in harmony, and all the while I heard her voice screaming out with ecstasy like I’d never heard from her before, and this more than anything was the final straw for my patience with myself.  I knew it now, I knew.

  I wasn’t merely an aether-animated body that needed flesh to survive, and I was no simple Godforsaken vampire come back from the dead to haunt her loved ones; I finally remembered it, I wished so that I could refuse it again, but I knew of it already, so how could I forget!? How could I simply ignore it!?

  I awoke with a cold sweat, and though I’d strangely heard Arianna mewling with a dreadful dissatisfaction: I tuned her out, for I had remembered the first blackness in full, and it had rather taken my mind with horror. 

  Why Luca had looked so strangely at me all the while before he’d barricaded me in here, the way he'd held me as if it was for the last time he ever would… it surely was the hole in the fabric of my dress! A hole which had offered glimpses straight through where my very heart had once been, for that is where I’d been skewered by the soldier when it came my turn to join the dead. 

  Helpful, he’d probably thought he was being, and so very kind as to not allow me to suffer long… but the hole was now gone, and it was his body I had eaten last night! Hah! Arriana always had a real vengeful streak underneath, and I wondered how she’d known whom to serve up to me first.

  The children were crying when I’d entered the house, and I should have known then, but I was rather too self-focused to pay them the mind they deserved, why… why would they all at once be crying so many hours after, and looking at me with fear in their wide eyes?! Why didn’t I see their fear?! 

  Mercy, Luca, for how long did you suffer knowing what I’d become before I’d made you lock me in here? He’d always kept his gaze towards me, why hadn’t I noticed the prepared spellcraft in his eyes? Why, Luca, why didn’t you strike me down out of instinct alone? I thought we’d taught him so well, but there was still so much more we couldn’t teach him anymore.

  That night I had been stuck clean through the heart, and I knew that no mere vampire could have risen in those circumstances, for the staking of the heart was an endlessly common burial practice, though to really be sure, a body would have been instead burned. Ghouls were dead risen by aetherial ambience, and usually where there was one, there were a thousand all rising, as Caesar’s legion had long ago, and they exclusively feasted upon the rotting dead, with less desire for the freshly dead, and none whatsoever for the living until they were made otherwise! 

  Neither of these creatures could remotely defy the laws of mass and matter, and though leaving the body was possible for a vampire, for the body was but a vessel by which their terrible spirit strengthened: they were not interested in the already-dead whatsoever, and so they were known to keep ‘thralls’ all throughout the Deadlands.

  Until I’d dined upon a person from top to toe, perhaps it might have been hard for me to understand… but these creatures, they surely don’t see humanity like people. We are chattel to them; both a delicious dessert, and a wonderfully scrumptious breakfast; we exist to be molested for their thrills and joys, and beaten bloody as flesh-sacks for their unleashed angers and woes!

  My mind cast about for which evil monster I must have become; I’d read so much of these conditions before, and they must have been documented somewhere! Ghouls and vampires were out… I couldn’t have been a changeling, those were out west and they are not risen but born. Stories of werebeasts came out of the north often, but I was certainly not lunar-affected, and they were not known for escaping death’s claws. 

  So many beasts in human skin ran through my mind, but I could not arrive at an answer! There were rumours of creatures that yet lived among us, and murdered our children to masquerade as them… but who hasn’t heard that they don’t butcher us for sustenance as do cannibal tribes, but instead plot to use us for their rather nefarious ends? Of course I knew these tales, I would be surprised if there remained a single person who wasn’t at least once entertained on a dark night by such stories. 

  Unfortunately, I’d been rather scientifically inclined before, when it didn’t matter near so much to me as now, and so I’d dismissed most of the fluff that came with those stories before, and rightly so I should have then thought! Yet my nightmares made it rather clear that a being lacking in human morals entirely would make those horrible tales that had once kept me awake until the early hours of dawn ‘the romances’ of the subject matter.

  To the monsters, we surely have no rights, no purpose in existence aside from their Godless intentions for us! Mercy, but was I really thinking that we’re all that much better than the monsters? When the fate of our village came into my mind, I'd had to reconsider what humanity hath wrought:  

  Death, in all its flavours, from the skewered to the beaten and beheaded… and the depravity besides that some had engaged in, before my beloved had broken free of their arcanists and slew them all like less than animals, were particularly… they made my nightmares almost look pleasant.

  But I had to chide myself for believing for one second that I was better than those brute beasts and morally misguided humans… for I felt a feverish heat still from that last dream, and I knew that I would do those things, at least with her… and I wouldn’t have even been inclined to ask her before I’d started, because I was sure she’d have it turned into a new game for us to play before long.

  Being that none of the dreadful creatures I’d been considering quite matched with my symptoms: I had to wonder long and hard as I picked through all my learning, and I thought of the first long blackness I’d felt back then; my death. 

  I was dead, and that certainly was a terrible thing to know, but what was worse by far was remembering what'd happened after… that feeling where I’d been trapped in my own skin and unable to leave, to see the light of peace and salvation and to be yet denied it was an agony upon the soul, and it twisted me inside my own dead flesh. 

  The phylactery had drawn Arianna’s soul inside it, but perhaps it had also pressed mine around hers, for I felt her inside me even now. Her soul had always been immensely magical, and if her ascension was successful: she’d become as aether incarnate. I’d always been devoid entirely of such a mystical force, and in the past some had even called me a cursed child, so following that logic I had to wonder with a laugh if mine had become a rejection of aether itself, as if such a thing could be real.

  But there was no more denying it for me: I was sick, wrong in a manner I’d never heard of before, and not knowing is what makes people their most powerless. I shakily stood on my feet, and her voice rang out around me with disappointed moans. 

  Was I truly hearing her voice now, or was it the echoed remnant of the dream? Excitement lingered still from my dream, and it grabbed upon my greatest hopes, that I could bring her happiness again, but all the same I made to slip on the summer dress that had fallen onto the floor.

  Arianna whined at me for clothing myself, but it wasn’t as if she’d never see me naked again, so I ignored her and I opened the shutters to the darkness of night. Lisset must have returned by now, and if my dream from before was damnable proof: if I really truly fancied someone, then I could not be sure I would remain in control, as if I heard what I wanted out of hallucination: how was I to tell? Though realistically, how could she possibly ever want me to bleed her as vampires do?  

  It was not even worth consideration, surely, and that should have been enough for me to stay here, but my sanity clearly wasn’t quite with me anymore. I was a woman who believed she had died, and that I was communicating with the voice of my dearly-departed as if she had been inside me all along, and my mind had been conjuring up illusions of the bizarre, the strange, and the impossible!

  I wished to all the angels the Father had beaten into me that it weren’t so, but I’d been at least a little into her in the past, and who wouldn’t have been?  I didn’t have to envy Bart, I had Arianna after all, but Lisset was still very appealing to look at, and it wasn’t as though I could drain the life from a rock, and so I had well and truly lost my own trust.

  I wondered there, if this is how rapists feel, like they’re on a precipice of control, and as though the slightest sign is sufficient? Pah! I can’t exactly speak like I could know whatever went through their evil minds, and I should think that they must be even weaker-willed than I to fall to such depravity over mere desire…. but for all that I cannot know a fiendish man’s mind: I sure knew what was going through mine!  

  Bloodthirst, an ever present hunger for the living, and a desire of such intensity… plainly, I wanted very passionately to tear a poor enraptured woman apart while I drained her of lifeblood… an impossible fantasy! Really, I wanted my beloved so desperately, but she was already gone from the realm of the living… but I love her, and surely I wouldn’t do such a thing on the very morrow following her passing?!

  How could I do this to the woman I love: to betray her but one day dead, and all the more while she was still aware, and entirely unable to turn away from the matter? Was my coveting for a ridiculous dreamland fantasy really sufficient for me to stoop so low and infidelious?! 

  Surely I couldn’t be addicted to something I’d never even tried; to something so utterly impossible and insane. How, I again wondered, for the thought truly frightened me, could someone possibly consent to die over such a whimsical interest come from the depravity of a man-eating monster?!  

  They must first have to be suicidal, and second they must have lost any esteem they’d ever had of themselves, and finally they must be willing to endure being torn apart limb from limb… and all for a simple satisfaction of someone whose humanity may well be skin deep?  

  It surely was an uncomfortable thought, Mercy but I was uncomfortable thinking about these things.  It isn’t every day a person wakes up a monster, and I was so nauseous and appalled just thinking about this that I wished I would just stop and think of absolutely anything else, but I just couldn’t help my inclination to muse over such matters when they concerned me.

  The answer to this ailment wasn’t remotely a certainty… an antidote to cure me somehow of death would be wonderful, but as a doctor, I knew that the only solutions were either abstinence and prayer, or some form of indulgence, and if Arianna had not yet lived: I might yet have prescribed a more staying death upon myself. 

  I knew that Lisset at least must be separated from me, and soon, and I knew that better than to trust in myself anymore was to trust in the absolute physical law of distance.

  Unfortunately, as I was considering how to make myself fit out the window, which was rather too small to accomodate me without some major renovations, I’d heard a scuffle taking place in the hallway, and the sliding sound of wood against wood soon had both my surprise and attention.

  A cacophony of muffled phrases were exchanged over each other such that despite their rising volume: I could not understand a single thing that they’d said, though I could tell that my son and Lisset accounted for two of the voices. 

  It was such an odd and sudden happening that for a moment I’d felt rather frozen in place, but then the door handle rattled, and all hell broke loose in my heart.

  I panicked greatly, and I looked for another way out as if there were any other exits I could possibly have taken, but there remained only the privacy window. It was too small for me, so I did the next best thing I could: I wrapped myself up in blankets, and I raced into the far corner.

  If I couldn’t escape, then the least I could do was to prevent myself from chasing them down before they could lock the door again. The door swung open with a creak, which is how I’d known of it, and a few seconds passed in which the patter of feet foretold the arrival of the prettiest airhead who ever lived.

  “Miiiirraaaa!!!” Lisset squealed as she tackled me from the back, driving me even further down to the floor than I’d actually thought possible, and I was feeling that terrible discomfort rather acutely when she’d mercilessly continued, 

  “You’re alive! You’re really alive! And I’m so sorry about Arianna dear; Lord knows I’m missing Bart.”

  As I did my best to sort through the pain while retaining my control, I was rather surprised that my vision hadn’t simply gone red with her mere presence, and I heard Luca speaking with urgency,

  “Miss Fredrickson, I know you’ve missed mum, but you need to leave her be! It isn’t safe to be near her right now!”

  At that moment, I wished for anything that Lisset would listen to Luca, if not for her own sake then at least for mine! Although I was endlessly relieved that I hadn’t immediately followed in the path of my nightmares: my spine really wasn’t supposed to bend in this manner!

  “Sheepshit! She saved my boy, didn’t she!” Lisset absolutely puffed with pride for me, and my heart warmed a bit, Petyr had made it to this point, and I wondered if he caught a fever, before I suddenly felt the sweet release of my backbones, and I immediately straightened up as she turned upon my son, 

  “You can’t just keep your mother locked up like this because she’s unwell!”

 Luca argued back with anger laced throughout his voice, "It's standard practice, you should know better after Tali-"

  He was surely trying to remind her of the quarantine we'd had to put Talia through when she'd developed the mumps, sweet mercy but she was always such a sickly child, but I knew Lisset wouldn't understand it. Her respect for me was the only reason she'd allowed me to do it before, so I'd been in the process of standing up, and his voice went dead. I turned towards him, and I saw aether absolutely flooding into his eyes, but I wasn’t about to tell my son to disarm himself before an undead creature that might've attacked him at any moment.

  Lisset’s arms came around me again as I stood, and so we shared in a dangerous hug; hers was tight and I could almost feel my ribs creak, Mercy she was strong, but mine was gentle and rather careful to avoid touching her much more than was necessary, as my control felt as delicate as if upon a razor’s edge.

  “Please, Lisset, could you go and get me something to eat?” I managed to speak through the pounding of her heart, and I felt that if she did not let me go very soon: a terrible fate might come for my dear friend at my own hands, just as I’d feared doing even worse to my own son just yesterday!

  “Sure!” Lisset cried out, and after a very tight squeeze that left my bones aching and my bloodthirst soaring, she’d raced back out the door for the kitchen.

  I turned to Luca, and although I terribly wished to ask him how it was that Lisset had come by the key for the door handle, I knew we didn’t have enough time until Lisset would return, so instead I said to my son,

  “Go, go! We don’t have long til she’s back! I’ll block the door from my side, so go!”

  My boy could listen even if he couldn’t keep a key out of that airhead’s hands, and he was soon behind the door. Oddly, I heard it click behind him, so perhaps there was more than one key? No, that made some sense, but I needed something, and I knew just the person to ask,

  “Rianna? Would you please block the door so Lisset can’t kill herself?”

  At once, the black mist went out, and although I’d been expecting her to pile something heavy in front of the doorway, she’d instead sent the mist around the gaps of the door itself, and I watched in awe as she’d turned the door into yet another unbroken section of wall.

  I dropped to my knees in amazement, and my admiration for her magical talents overwhelmed me for a while, and I couldn’t help but to ask a question that had formed at the very heart of all my doubts,

  “Rianna… how exactly did you do that?”